Mordecai Bauman

Mordecai Hirsch Bauman (March 12, 1912 – May 16, 2007) was an American baritone whose career spanned Broadway performance, recording, and arts education across several decades. Born in the Bronx, New York City, to Allen and Minnie Bauman, he attended James Monroe High School before pursuing concurrent studies at two institutions simultaneously — a distinction that set him apart early in his training. During his freshman year at Columbia College in 1930, he was awarded a fellowship to the Juilliard Graduate School of Music, becoming the first and only student to attend both schools at the same time. At Juilliard, he studied voice with Francis Rogers.

Bauman's Broadway career extended from 1931 to 1954 and included appearances in Jack and the Beanstalk, Let Freedom Ring, the play Within the Gates, and Sandhog. His stage work coincided with a period of political engagement; during the 1930s he became active in the communist political movement in the United States and made recordings for the Timely Recording Company with an ensemble known as The New Singers, which recorded English-language versions of well-known communist songs.

His recording work extended beyond political material. In 1938, Bauman made the first recordings of six songs by Charles Ives, released by Musicraft and issued on a 78 rpm disc through New Music Quarterly Recordings. These recordings are documented in the 1988 volume Song on Record, edited by Alan Blyth. In 1941, he served as narrator in the world premiere of Paul Bunyan, the opera by Benjamin Britten with a libretto by W. H. Auden, performed at Columbia University.

Bauman and his wife, Irma Commanday, founded the Indian Hill Art Workshop in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, which became the first summer arts school for high school students in the country. The workshop remained in operation until 1978. Later in his career, Bauman led a tour to the Bach Festival in Leipzig during the Bach Tercentenary in 1985, and subsequently completed a documentary titled The Stations of Bach, filmed in East Germany. The project received funding from the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities and was broadcast nationally on PBS in 1990. CUNY TV later acquired the documentary and has broadcast it annually on Bach's birthday, March 21.

In 2006, Bauman and Irma published a joint memoir, From Our Angle of Repose. He died in Manhattan in 2007 at the age of 95.